Abstract:

Contact problems play a dominate role in almost all engineering disciplines, thus there is a huge demand for computational contact mechanics. One of the most impressive application is crash analysis. In the scope of this master’s thesis contact mechanics is approached in an object-oriented manner. A three-dimensional nonlinear node-to-surface contact algorithm is derived and implementation details are presented. For constraint enforcement the penalty method is used.

The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first two chapters give an introduction to the topic and describe computational contact mechanics in the framework of object orientation. Next, the basic theory is presented. The implemented 4-node contact element is formulated in the fourth chapter. After the contact element is derived the object-oriented implementation is explained. Finally, examples are presented and discussed.